Planning to fly? Book your ticket on a weekend, A&M research says

Updated 8:13 pm, Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Steven Puller, associate professor of economics at Texas A&M, found that airline tickets purchased on weekends are more likely to be discounted than those bought during the week.

Steven Puller, associate professor of economics at Texas A&M, found that airline tickets purchased on weekends are more likely to be discounted than those bought during the week.

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Planning to fly? Book your ticket on a weekend, A&M research says

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Weekends are the best time to book flights, according to new research at Texas A&M.

Steven Puller, associate professor of economics at A&M, found that airlines are more likely to discount fares on Saturday and Sunday.

"There's been this industry folk wisdom that says Tuesdays and Wednesdays are the best days to purchase airline tickets," Puller said in a news release. "But we couldn't find any systematic analysis to back that up."

In the study, published in December in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Puller and former Texas A&M graduate student Lisa Taylor found that tickets purchased on the weekend were an average of 5 percent cheaper than similar tickets purchased on weekdays.

The researchers controlled for various factors, including the day of week of travel, whether the ticket was refundable, the number of days in advance that the ticket was purchased and how full the flights were, among others.

The 5-percent-average discount applied only to the day of purchase, not to the day of travel.

To get the best weekend purchase discount, study results suggest booking a flight on a route with both business and leisure customers, since weekend discounts aren't common for vacation destinations like Orlando or Las Vegas, the release said.

On a route that serves both business and leisure travelers, the typical weekend purchase is more likely to be made by a leisure traveler than a business traveler, said Puller, who specializes in industrial organization.

"There is an incentive for the airlines to lower fares on the weekends to try to entice the price-sensitive leisure traveler to buy a ticket," he said.

Airlines, of course, don't usually know if a particular ticket buyer is travelling for business or pleasure but they play the odds, he said.

And airlines have long used restrictions, such as including a Saturday night stay at the destination point, to separate presumed business travelers from those taking pleasure trips, Puller said.

Puller and Taylor looked at a historical archive of several hundred thousand actual tickets purchased on six "legacy" airlines, including American, Continental, Delta, Northwest, United and U.S. Air. They studyied only round-trip flights with nonstop service and excluded first-class airfare and the travel periods around Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's.

Puller says the results could have implications for other industries that have the ability to change prices daily based on the types of customers who purchase on a specific day.

"The software systems that are used in airline pricing are used in other industries such as cruises, hotels and car rentals," he said in the news release. "We've only analyzed airline pricing, but I wouldn't be surprised if similar pricing practices are used in these other industries as well."